April 14, 2017
Interview with Megan McArdle, author of the book The Up Side Of Down
Mike Carruthers:
No one likes to fail but you can make it easier on yourself.
Megan McArdle:
By focusing less on the person than on the process – you know success and failure they’re not something that you are, they’re something that happened.
Megan McArdle, author of the book The Up Side Of Down…
You look at someone like Steven Spielberg who’s one of the best filmmakers in the world, made a really terrible movie called 1941 that just bombed at the box office. He felt just as bad about that as we feel about the things that happen in our life and he was Steven Spielberg. There’s no way to say, “oh well I just won’t feel bad about it” because that’s not how human beings are built. But you can focus on the future.
The way to overcome failure, in fact the only way to overcome failure, says Megan, is to keep moving forward.
It is less important to focus on exactly what you’re going to do and have a master plan with 80 steps. Because frankly like all other plans when they meet contact with reality they’re probably not going to be exactly the way that you planned it out. Get out of your house, make connection. Because everytime you leave the house and do something you are creating an opportunity for something to happen.
There’s no magic skill for absorbing failure and feeling good about it.
Most people who’ve had these experiences can tell you the same thing. They’ve spent some time making some big mistakes after they’ve failed because it felt so bad but then they got over it. And it wasn’t just because they’re special people. It was because they forced themselves to think about going forward instead of what they lost and the mistakes that they had made.
